When Apple announced to the world last month that it would be spending an eye-popping almost $850 million to buy solar power from a solar farm to be built in central California, clean energy fans naturally cheered. But there was another common reaction by industry watchers, too: confusion.

Apple AAPL has long been known as one of shrewdest negotiators in the tech industry, and its tendency to make ultra aggressive deals has even led to partners struggling. But on the surface of Apple’s solar deal, the few financials they released just didn’t look all that competitive compared to the latest low cost solar panel farm deals that are being done.

Apple’s deal, announced in February, is to pay $848 million for the electricity from about half of the 280-megawatt solar farm, or 130 megawatts, over 25 years. PG&E PCG agreed to buy up the other half of the power, or 150 megawatts. Solar developer First Solar FSLR will develop the site and provide the panels.

But the key factor that has been overlooked in these calculations is that, while Apple and PG&E are splitting the solar power from the farm almost down the middle, PG&E’s deal is actually only for 15 years. Apple’s is for 25. After 15 years, Apple plans to buy up the solar power from the entire 280-megawatt site. So any financial calculations need to incorporate the fact that, in the last 10 years of the deal, Apple will be getting double the electricity.

At the Wall Street Journal’s Eco:nomics conference on Thursday, Apple’s vice president of environmental initiatives, Lisa Jackson, confirmed as much in an onstage interview. She said: “Something that most people don’t understand is that on the back end of the deal, it goes from a 130-megawatt deal to 280 megawatts. Toward the end of the 25-year period—I’m not going to say when—we get the rest of that.”

This big boost in capacity on the back end makes Apple’s solar deal look even more impressive than originally thought. Navigant Research analyst Sam Jaffe estimates that Apple’s deal is to pay around 8.2 cents per kilowatt hour, which is below commercial rates of 10 cents per kilowatt hour (not counting demand charges). That deal will look like “an extreme bargain” he says in the 2030’s when electricity rates will be significantly higher due to inflation.

Jaffe says: “This isn’t a good investment for Apple. It’s an excellent one. It’s a far better use of their investment capital than just about anything else. They are tripling their return over the next best similarly risked investment vehicle.”

During the onstage interview on Thursday, Jackson also provided more detail on just how much money Apple will be able to save in the long term compared to what it would be paying to buy electricity from the power grid in the more traditional manner. She said Apple could save “hundreds of millions of dollars” by agreeing to buy the fixed electricity rates (that slightly escalate over time) compared to how grid rates have historically risen.

Apple’s CEO Tim Cook originally said that the solar deal made “business sense” when he made the announcement in February. But with substantial savings like these, it could lead to more and more big companies to seek out these types of commercial solar contracts.

Beyond the economics

A map of the proposed solar site in California.Kinison Brown/County of Monterey, California

A little over 150 miles North of the Santa Barbara resort where Jackson made her comments about the solar deal, sits the sprawling, rural grasslands that will eventually be home to the high-profile solar farm. The 3,000-acre site is about seven miles south of the tiny town of Parkfield, and it sits on a section of a 72,000-acre cattle ranch known as Jack Ranch that is owned by Hearst.

Construction hasn’t started on the site yet. On Wednesday, I drove up to the edge of the project on the way down to the Santa Barbara event. The only public road currently available up to the area is called Turkey Flat Road, from which the area takes its name, which takes you right up to a big gate that blocks entrance to the private land. And yes, there are turkeys to be found there (saw one!), as well as handfuls of roaming cattle, hawks, and other animals.

Beyond the fence, the land will soon likely be cleared and the solar panels installed on poles. Jaffe predicts that the farm will use single access trackers for the panels, which would result in 5.5 hours per day of average solar capacity in Monterey County. The solar site is supposed to take 12 to 18 months to build, and construction is supposed to start in the middle of this year.

Eventually First Solar will build out the main access point to the solar site from Highway 41 in San Luis Obispo County, which is on the other side of the project from Turkey Flat Road. The area will also get a transmission line, and two substations, in addition to the existing transmission line and transmission capacity near by.

As I learned when I visited the Topaz solar site last year, the sheer size of these sprawling solar panel farms is hard to fathom when just looking at megawatt and kilowatt-hour numbers on paper. Driving and walking around (or even flying over) the areas do them far more justice.

Months of environmental reviews are conducted on these sites before construction is started, or approved, even when the land is former grazing land and not sensitive untouched land as it is for this project. In the future, some in the solar industry think that solar panel projects like these will become smaller and more modular in size in order to become more accommodating to the land and local residents.

However these sites ultimately look down the road, they represent a major future for U.S. energy. Apple has positioned itself at the forefront of this coming wave. In 2014 the U.S. installed 6.2 gigawatts of solar panels, up 30 percent from 2013, according to the Solar Energy Industry Association. New solar capacity built in 2014 represented a third of all of the new electricity capacity built in the U.S. And there’s expected to be another 8.1 gigawatts of solar panels installed this year.

California is first state with 5% of its electricity from solar

California’s big push into clean energy is seeing results as the state became the first with at least 5% of its overall electricity coming from large-scale solar projects last year.

That’s according to a new study from the U.S. Energy Information Administration, which said Tuesday that the Golden State more than doubled the percentage of its overall electricity production that comes from utility-scale solar power. (Utility-scale solar plants are those that generate greater than 1 megawatt.) California’s solar output grew from 1.9% of the state’s total electricity in 2013 to 5% last year as the state generated a record 9.9 million megawatthours (MWh) in 2014 — up from 3.8 million MWh a year earlier.

California was followed by Arizona and Nevada, both of which generated 2.8% of their total electricity from big solar plants. Of course, abundant sunshine helped those states. But even northeastern states like Massachusetts and New Jersey cracked the top ten list, according to the EIA.

New Jersey came in fourth with 1% of its electricity from solar plants. North Carolina, where Duke Energy recently committed $500 million to build three solar farms, placed fifth with a solar output of 0.7%. However, the EIA also found that a total of 36 states had no meaningful solar output last year.

In fact, businesses have increasingly pushed into solar power, which is expected to surpass traditional fossil fuels in coming decades. Solar City SCTY, the solar power systems company founded by Tesla CEO Elon Musk and his cousins in 2006, has seen its market valuation grow to nearly $5 billion.

The renewable energy movement is especially strong in California, where the state government has pledged to generate at least one-third of its overall electricity from renewable sources — including solar as well as windpower and biomass energy — by 2020. The state recently unveiled two of the largest solar photovoltaic plants in the world, the Topaz and Desert Sunlight plants, each of which will have the capacity to produce 550 megawatts.

California’s current historic drought has made it all the more necessary for the state to turn to renewable energy sources other than hydroelectric power, which the EIA said was off by 46% last year compared to the state’s five-year average.

Green jobs are growing, but politics get in the way

The technology to produce solar and wind energy keeps getting better and cheaper, electric cars are more practical and more popular than ever, and scientists’ warnings about climate change keep getting more alarming. So you’d think that businesses producing or using renewable energy would be growing like mad, giving rise to a big surge of new jobs.

They are, up to a point.

More than 170 public and private renewable energy projects across the U.S. created about 47,000 jobs last year, according to nonprofit, nonpartisan business group Environmental Entrepreneurs (E2). Since E2 started tracking green employment three years ago, more than 233,000 people have gone to work in clean energy and green public transportation jobs, according to the group’s recently published annual report.

The biggest winner last year was solar power, thanks partly to a federal investment tax credit (more about that in a minute). More than 20,000 new solar-related jobs were announced at 60 projects nationwide. Electric vehicles came in second, adding more than 9,000 jobs. General Motors, for one, is investing heavily in advanced battery technology, and streamlining its production methods to make electric cars more affordable. In 2014, the U.S. auto industry sold about 119,000 electric cars and trucks, an increase of 128% since 2012.

Still, green employment would no doubt be growing faster if climate change weren’t such a political hot potato, both in Washington and in many state capitals. Take, for instance, that federal tax credit for solar energy producers. Along with other factors like declining prices for the materials used in solar panels, the credit has energized the industry, encouraging solar equipment manufacturers like SolarWorld and First Solar to expand and add jobs at plants in Ohio, New York, and Oregon.

Just one problem: Would-be investors in solar are hesitating to get in too deep because the tax credit is set to expire at the end of 2016. It could be extended, of course, but consider what happened to a similar federal tax credit for wind energy that expired last December. Instead of authorizing it for at least another couple of years, as wind-energy advocates had hoped, Congress voted to renew it for two weeks. A bill passed on December 17 extended the credit only to projects that broke ground by December 31.

And then there’s all the well-publicized wrangling between Capitol Hill and the White House over issues like the Keystone Pipeline, coal-plant emissions standards, and Alaskan wilderness oil-drilling rights. The political tug-of-war on almost every energy-related public policy question has created “a climate of uncertainty that casts a cloud over clean energy industries,” notes Bob Keefe, E2’s executive director, who describes Congress as “sitting on Capitol Hill endlessly debating new ways to prop up coal, oil, and other dirty-energy companies.”

Some state capitals are just as polarized as Washington. So it’s no coincidence that the states with the most green job creation are those where public policy is friendly toward renewable energy, or at least stays out of the way.

In Nevada, for example, Governor Brian Sandoval and the state legislature successfully wooed Tesla Motors, which, last September, chose Reno as the site of its “Gigafactory,” a 500-acre, $5 billion lithium ion battery plant to support production of its electric cars. The factory will employ 6,500 full-time workers. In part because of tax breaks and other government goodies, Nevada has become a prime market for solar power companies like SolarCity, which quadrupled its projected hiring of panel installers in the state.

With politicians and the private sector in agreement about energy policy, Nevada ranks No. 1 in green job creation among the 50 states. The rest of the top 10, in descending order: California, New York, Michigan, Arizona, Texas, Colorado, North Carolina, Utah, and New Mexico.

The technology trendsetter AAPL actually touched that mark late last year, but Tuesday was the first day its stock closed above those levels. Among its peers, Google GOOG is closest at $365 billion, followed by Microsoft MSFT at $349 billion.

That $700 billion level is super great psychologically for investors. Still, I’m equally intrigued by another “first” that Apple disclosed on Tuesday: a $850 million agreement with First Solar FSLR to buy power directly from a massive solar plant in California. It’s the biggest deal of this nature (yet) that doesn’t involve a utility company in the middle.

Under the contract, Apple will buy almost all of the power produced by the 2,900-acre installation being built on property owned by Hearst. (Local utility Pacific Gas and Electric will buy the rest.) Overall, Apple’s portion of the installation will have a generating capacity of 130 megawatts, which is roughly the amount of power needed to run Apple’s corporate headquarters, and its entire California facility footprint. Construction is scheduled to begin in mid-2015; it should be completed by the end of next year.

“We know in Apple that climate change is real,” Apple CEO Tim Cook told attendees at the Goldman Sachs technology conference in San Francisco. “The time for talk is passed. The time for action is now.”

To those who pooh-pooh Apple’s latest clean energy investment as a wonky corporate sustainability ploy: you’re entirely missing the point, and you can expect more of the same.

If you look behind the green aspects, the biggest benefit is simple and tangible. The 25-year contract provides Apple with a stable supply of electricity, at preordained prices. What CFO wouldn’t want that kind of visibility? It’s the same motivation powering Apple’s strategy to invest in on-site renewable energy technology in North Carolina, Las Vegas, and other locations. Yes, it helps that Apple has former EPA chief Lisa Jackson on staff to help, but it isn’t just a touch-feely thing.

In fact, just about every tech company hoping to win big in cloud services is embracing the renewable energy mantra—a notable exception is IBM, which has been largely mum on procurement, although it loves talking about the energy efficiency of its data center technology.

There will be more deals like this Apple one, if for no other reason than big businesses are sick of waiting around for state and federal governments to get their act together.

This item first appeared in the Feb. 11 edition of Data Sheet, Fortune’s daily newsletter on the business of technology. Sign up here.

Update Feb. 11, 2015: This article was updated to add more details about the facilities covered by the solar power.

Apple investing $850 million in California solar farm

Apple AAPL Chief Executive Tim Cook said on Tuesday the technology company is investing $850 million to help build a solar farm in California with solar panel maker First Solar.

The project in Monterey County, California will provide enough energy for 60,000 homes as well as Apple’s future head office in nearby Cupertino, Cook said at a Goldman Sachs technology conference in San Francisco.”We know in Apple that climate change is real. The time for talk is passed,” he said. “The time for action is now.”

First Solar, based in Tempe, Arizona, manufactures solar panels and also builds solar power plants, many of which it sells to power producers.

Construction of the 2,900-acre California Flats Solar Project is expected to start in mid-2015 and finish by the end of next year, First Solar said in a statement.

Apple will receive electricity from 130 megawatts of capacity under a 25-year purchase agreement, the largest in the industry to provide clean energy to a commercial end user, First Solar said. Output of the project’s remaining 150 megawatts will go to Pacific Gas and Electric Co.

Apple already uses renewable energy to power its data centers. Last week, it said it would invest $2 billion over 10 years to convert a failed sapphire glass plant in Arizona into a data center that would be powered mostly by solar energy.

“Apple still has work to do to reduce its environmental footprint, but other Fortune 500 CEOs would be well served to make a study of Tim Cook,” Greenpeace said in a statement following Tuesday’s announcement.

Shares of Apple ended up 1.92 percent at $122.02.

First Solar’s stock rose 3 percent in extended trade after closing up 4.77 percent at $48.54.

In U.S., there are twice as many solar workers as coal miners

SolarCity, the largest installer of residential solar systems in the U.S., nearly doubled its workforce last year, hiring 4,000 people to do everything from system design and site surveys to installation and engineering.

The hiring spree at SolarCity isn’t slowing; it’s picking up speed as the company attempts to install twice as many rooftop solar systems than last year and readies its 1.2 million-square foot factory in New York, which is scheduled to reach full production in 2017.

The company’s expansion is indicative of what’s happening within the broader solar industry. More than 31,000 new solar jobs were created in the U.S. in 2014 bringing the total to 173,807—a 21.8 percent increase in employment since November 2013, according to a report released Thursday by The Solar Foundation. This is the second consecutive year that solar jobs have increased by at least 20 percent.

The solar industry is still dwarfed by the 9.8 million workers that the American Petroleum Industry says are employed the oil and gas industry. However, the Solar Foundation is quick to point out the industry is starting to surpass some fossil fuel-related job categories.

Solar already employs more people than coal mining, which has 93,185 workers, and has added 50 percent more jobs in 2014 than the oil and gas pipeline construction industry (10,529) and the crude petroleum and natural gas extraction industry (8,688) did combined, according to the Solar Foundation.

One out of every 78 new jobs created in the U.S. over the past 12 months were created by the solar industry, representing nearly 1.3 percent of all jobs created in the country. Solar companies surveyed for the fifth annual census plan to add another 36,000 employees this year.

“That’s just insane,” Rive says. “The solar industry is literally contributing to the job growth of the U.S. economy—and it’s just so understated.”

The solar job-growth trend has spilled beyond the confines of companies solely dedicated to the renewable energy source.

NRG Energy, one of the largest U.S. independent power producers and owner of 88 fossil fuel and nuclear plants, is expanding its solar business rapidly. NRG’s Home Solar group, the residential solar division of NRG Home, hired 500 people in the past 12 months and now has 1,200 workers.

“We’re growing explosively in several markets,” NRG Home Solar president Kelcy Pegler Jr. said in an interview with Fortune on Thursday following the company’s investor day presentation.

As a result, Pegler’s residential home solar group plans to add “hundreds of jobs” this quarter and will double its current headcount in the next two years.

NRG Energy, which employs 10,000 people, reorganized last year into three business lines: NRG Business, NRG Home and NRG Renew. The company NRG has a number of other solar-related jobs within NRG Renew and NRG Home, including its power on the go division which was expanded after the 2014 acquisition of portable solar power company Goal Zero.

Overall, solar is one of the fastest growing segments within NRG Energy and the NRG Home group, a business unit that also includes the company’s electricity providers, home services, power on the go products and electric vehicle charging, Pegler says.

Residential solar’s role in creating jobs is largely under appreciated by the public, he says: “These aren’t just part-time jobs either, these are careers.”

Vivint Solar CEO: Republican Congress will be good for industry

Vivint Solar VSLR yesterday reported its first quarterly earnings since going public last month, reporting a net loss of $0.45 per share on $8.3 million in revenue. It also said to expect a Q4 slowdown in installations, but that it still would meet (and likely surpass) its annual megawatt goals.

While the Q4 slowdown is to be expected, due to winter weather, it’s a bit more unusual to hear a cleantech CEO who seems to sunny about the arrival of a Republican Congressional majority. But that’s the sentiment of Vivint Solar boss Greg Butterfield, who explained his thinking in a phone interview with Fortune.

What follows is an edited transcript of our conversation:

FORTUNE: How important is the federal government to the solar industry, regardless of which party is in control?

BUTTERFIELD: I think the federal government steps in whenever something must be done to benefit the broader public. For example, it has offered subsidies for oil and gas since just about forever. It also provides the ITC tax credit for solar, which has been instrumental for us to build a renewable, lower-cost energy service. There is a step-down in the credit anticipated for 2016, but we believe we’ll still be successful after that happens. Actually, from a competitive standpoint, it may be good for us because one challenge to any subsidy is that it can prop up some under-performing companies that otherwise might not exist… But I don’t know that it would be good for the consumer.

Conventional wisdom has been that Democrats support green energy companies and Republicans do not. Is this not a fair dichotomy?

I would agree with that from a historical perspective, but the unique thing about solar’s value proposition now is that it’s equally important to both political parties. Whether blue or red, left or right. For Democrats and environmentalists, it’s positive because it helps change how the world views energy and helps us quit depleting natural resources. For the other side, solar can be about freedom of choice and companies that are creating thousands of jobs. What you really have here is capitalists making environmentalists happy, which doesn’t happen too often, and consumers are getting lower overall energy costs.

But hasn’t that ‘freedom of choice’ issue always been present? There’s no more freedom in choosing solar panels in 2014 than in 1984.

I think the main difference is that the solar industry is now much more mature. There have been significant advancements in making the technology more efficient and cheaper. By the time of the proposed step-down, we’ll have more than 40 states at grid parity — so this is really a new model and new way to create a more reliable choice in powere.

Any concerns that the tax credit ‘step-down’ could become more pronounced by this Congress?

I have not heard of anyone saying it will be a cliff, although I have heard certain people propose that the step-down not be as significant. If you look at the state level, the public utilities commissions are being more than fair.

From a business standpoint, are you just rationalizing or are you truly pleased with last Tuesday’s results?

I’m truly pleased. I live in Utah, which is very conservative, and my background in in building companies from nothing to billions of dollars in value. This is probably the best solution I’ve seen in my 25-plus year career, and think it is appreciated by red and blue because both of them include consumers and shareholders.

How important is the future success of companies like Vivint to getting venture capitalists to once again take chances on early-stage cleantech companies?

I think the better we do, the more fuel it adds back on the fire. I’ve been in VC myself, prior to coming here, and I think what happened is that a lot of people lost a lot of money and got scared. But there have been major disruptions in the technology. Whereas before you had subsidies holding up certain companies that maybe weren’t sound financially without them, we now have us and Tesla and SolarCity and a bunch of companies doing well by using more modern technology. I think that, over time, it will help create more early-stage investment.

Can solar bonds transform America’s energy infrastructure?

Lyndon Rive, the loquacious co-founder and chief executive of SolarCity, says his company isn’t desperate for capital.

The largest installer of residential solar systems in the U.S. SCTY has already amassed some $325 million selling asset-backed securities to institutional investors—a strategy that has made it a standout in the industry. Every time the company has gone out to the securitization or institutional market, the offerings have always been significantly oversubscribed, Rive said. In all, the company, whose chairman is Tesla Motors and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, has created funds to finance the installation of about $5 billion in renewable energy assets with investments from large institutions and companies including U.S. Bank and Google GOOG.

Even if SolarCity had more capital, the company, which has a market cap of $4.3 billion, could not grow any faster without compromising quality, Rive said in an interview with Fortune.

And yet, earlier this week, SolarCity issued $200 million in solar bonds to retail investors­—rather than targeting accredited or institutional investors—and launched an online portal to allow customers to buy bonds directly with no added fees. The solar bonds, which will be available online to investors who are at least 18 years old, can be purchased starting at $1,000 with maturities ranging from one to seven years and interest rates between 2% and 4%.

Rive, who founded the company with brother and chief technology officer Peter, sees raising capital through solar bonds as a tool that could revolutionize the nation’s energy infrastructure.

“When you sell these to institutional investors you don’t get anything out of that but money,” Rive said. “To me, it’s really important that we have consumers, homeowners, the American public participate in this transformation. And the best way to participate in this transformation is to get a financial return.”

In the case of SolarCity’s bonds, the financial return will come from the cash flow generated by thousands of long-term leases the company has with home and business owners who pay for electricity produced by its rooftop solar panels. The bonds will operate much like a CD with an interest rate paid over the course of the year for the duration of the bond. When the bond matures, the customer is repaid the principal investment. Payments from its still small energy storage business will also be included in the bond’s interest rate payment.

The solar bonds will also expand SolarCity’s reach from the 15 states it currently operates in to the entire country. Rive envisions a solar-snowball effect of sorts: If customers see a financial return on the bond, they’ll become more educated on solar and in turn, tell their friends about the renewable energy source or look to install themselves.

“Hopefully that will create a larger movement,” said Rive, who sees bond buyers as future customers and ambassadors for solar. More sources of capital will eventually reduce the cost of capital, Rive added.

Customers will be able to invest in the bonds through an online portal, technology made possible by SolarCity’s acquisition of the private company Common Assets in January for an undisclosed sum.

SolarCity’s solar bond issuance is unique because its open to retail investors, conducted directly through an online portal and isn’t based on a specific project or geographic boundary.

“We’ll always be an innovator on financial products; that’s in our DNA,” Rive said about SolarCity, which introduced a solar loan product in early October, issued its third securitization offering in July and partnered with Groupon in May.

Still, SolarCity is not the only company dabbling in the space.

Mosaic, a Calfornia startup, launched a crowdfunding campaign in January 2013 that allowed everyday folks to invest as little as $25 in four rooftop solar projects. Companies like Lending Club and Prosper have created similar online investment platforms. And the broader green bond market, which has been used to finance clean energy and environmental projects, has existed for about seven years.

The first green bond was launched in 2007, but it wasn’t until 2013 that there was a significant rise in issuance, according to Suzanne Buchta, managing director and head of Americas Green Debt Capital Markets at Bank of America Merrill Lynch.

Some $20 billion in green bonds were issued between 2007 and 2013. In just the first eight months of 2014, $30 billion in green bonds were issued.

“In the corporate space, we’ve only seen a handful come to the green bond market. It’s going to take more time before there are more issuers available to retail clients, and some issuers may never decide to target retail investors,” Buchta said.

Bond issuances targeted at retail investors are typically smaller and therefore require a little more work on the part of the issuer, Buchta explained. Companies might take on the extra work and issue bonds to retail investors to build brand awareness or to tap into investor interest.

Interest in the SolarCity’s bonds will come from existing customers who see this an extension of their commitment to solar as well as outsiders with a financial perspective, said Tim Newell, vice president of financial products and the former CEO of Common Assets.

“There’s also interest from those investors who want both,” Newell said. “Impact investors are a rapidly growing pool of investors who don’t want to make a choice. They want to be able to earn good returns on their investments and they want to be able to see their investments serve the goals they believe strongly in such as environmental protection, creating American jobs and other things.”

The rise of impact investing

Some 50 percent of ultra and high-net worth investors consider social and environment impact an important part of investment decision-making, according to a June 2014 report from U.S. Trust, a subsidiary of Bank of America.

Women and millennials are driving some of the demand for social impact investing. Nearly two-thirds of millennials and 63 percent of women feel that their investment decisions are a way to express their social, political and or environmental values. And one-third of ultra high net worth investors are currently invested in or interested in social environment impact investing strategies, including 66 percent of millennials, 40 percent of Generation X and 27 percent of baby boomers, according to the report.

For SolarCity, the solar bond offering is another step towards more vertical integration. In the past year, SolarCity has snapped up installation technology company Zep Solar for $158 million and high efficiency module manufacturer Silevo as well as expanded its operations and rolled out financial products.

In just the past six weeks, the company has broken ground on a massive module manufacturing plant in Buffalo, New York that will have the capacity to produce a gigawatt worth of solar panels a year, introduced its solar loan program and unveiled a new commercial product borne out of its Zep Solar acquisition.

While Rive doesn’t expect the next six weeks to be nearly as active, the company will continue to look at further vertical integration and new market opportunities.

He’s already set his sights beyond the New York gigafactory and says ultimately the company wants to build a five-gigawatt plant.

“Sometime in the next year or two will start looking past the one-gigawatt factory,” Rive said. “The number-one thing to look at is cost of energy and then the logistics around it.”

Vivint Solar CEO talks IPO

Residential solar energy company Vivint Solar VSLR went public earlier today, raising $330 million in its initial public offering. The company — which uses a door-to-door sales force to offer solar energy systems on long-term leases — priced its shares at $16 a piece (low end of proposed $16-$18 range). It closed up one penny on an awful day for the broader markets.

Following market close, Fortune spoke briefly with Vivint Solar CEO Greg Butterfield about the IPO process and his company’s chief rival, SolarCity SCTY. What follows is an edited transcript of our conversation:

Fortune: You priced the IPO at the bottom of its range and closed basically flat. Disappointing?

Butterfield: This is the second time I’ve taken a company public as CEO, and have been involved in some others. I view this as a financial event and am interested in the long-term. I was pleased with the pricing and we had a great reception with around 400 meetings. People got the story and were really excited about Vivint Solar. We can’t control what’s happening in Hong Kong today or what the Fed’s doing with rates. We can only focus on our business.

Did you get any heartburn early this morning, when the markets looked poised for a major fall?

Again, we can only focus on things we can control. We had a lot of volume, over 20 million shares traded, which I think showed people’s confidence and acceptance of our company and our management team. At around 2pm I looked at my phone and saw everything was red except for Vivint Solar.

It appears that you and SolarCity are on a bit of a geographic collision course, given where each of you are growing. Does that matter?

The reality is that we and SolarCity are 6/10 of 1% market penetrated, so right now we’re all aligned and growing together as an industry. That said, there are some differences in our businesses. We are downstream, whereas I think that SolarCity is going midstream. It recently bought a panel company and a racking company. We have partnerships with panel makers and racking companies, but don’t think we can be the best in everything, and are not looking to get into hardware. I think that gives us more strategic alignment with our customers, because we’re always looking to partner with the best providers.

What were common questions during the roadshow?

From a strategic standpoint, everyone wanted to talk about SolarCity and Vivint. But one other common question that was kind of tactical was about what happens if the homeowner wants to sell their home. The answer is that 100% transitions to the new homeowner.

Advertising week and job numbers: 5 things to watch for this week

CEOs and global leaders descended in New York City last week for the United Nations climate summit. Many Fortune 500 executives laid out their visions for combating global warming and all told agreed to put up more than $200 billion to finance clean energy and support vulnerable nations.

President Barack Obama pledged that the U.S. would lead the charge to combat climate change with as much as $100 billion invested annually to help the poorest countries shift away from fossil fuels and deal with worsening climate effects, such as floods and heat waves. The U.S. will also require all countries to establish emission targets by 2020.

Here’s what to watch out for in the week ahead.

1. Stay tuned during the commercial break: It’s Advertising Week.

The premier annual gathering of marketing and ad leaders kicks off on Monday in New York City. Advertising Week will feature more than 250 events over four days, and more than 90,000 brand marketers and ad professionals are expected to attend to discuss key business trends that are shaping the global media industry. Companies, including Facebook FB, are expected to introduce new ad initiatives at the event. Fortune’s own Pattie Sellers will host a conversation with BBG Fund president Susan Lyne about “The Evolution of Brands and Careers” on Thursday at the Liberty Theater.

2. Will pledging American allegiance boost Walgreen earnings?

Walgreen reports its fourth quarter earnings Tuesday. Investors watched the previous results closely to see if the drug store chain would move its headquarters abroad in a tax inversion deal involving UK-based Alliance Boots Holdings. Walgreen WAG announced shortly thereafter that it would buy Alliance Boots’ remaining shares but would not move its nominal home out of the U.S. Walgreen’s shares took a beating after that decision and still remain down almost 19% since the beginning of July. Analysts expect earnings-per-share of 74 cents on just over $19 billion in sales.

3. September employment numbers

Monthly employment figures for September will be released on Friday by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Monthly job gains had been over 200,000 for six months running, but that number dropped off in August as the employment market lost steam. Analysts will be watching to see if the hiring pace picked back up this month, especially as retailers prep for a big holiday shopping season. Holiday-season hiring is expected to reach its highest level since 1999 this year. Analysts expect around 215,000 non-farm jobs to be added in September and the unemployment rate to remain unchanged at 6.1%.

4. Microsoft takes the stage this week in yet another tech company reveal.

Microsoft will host a press conference on Tuesday during which it will reveal its new Windows 9 operating system. Microsoft MSFT is the latest in a line of tech companies announcing new products this fall. Since September, Apple AAPL, Samsung and Blackberry BBRY have all held events to introduce new devices.

Microsoft France president Alain Crozier leaked the new Windows release at a press conference earlier in the week, though many had already been speculating about the OS update. Microsoft said the event would focus on “what’s next for Windows.” The new OS is expected to fix technical issues that plagued Windows 8.1.

5. Here comes the sun energy.

The International Energy Agency will release a report Monday about the status of the global solar energy market and outline expectations for future growth. An early version of the IEA research shows that solar, in all forms, is expected to account for more than 50% of the world’s electricity by 2050.

The announcement comes on the heels of a week of discussions around climate change between business and government leaders at the United Nations. The report will provide insight into how much solar energy will contribute to the power mix in the future as well as what policies promote technological innovation and implementation.